


Just You, Me, and the Cat

by ambivalentangst



Category: Captain Marvel (2019), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Don’t copy to another site, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Not Spider-Man: Far From Home Mid-Credits Scene Compliant, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, The Lasting Effects of Quentin Beck's Assholery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-30
Updated: 2019-12-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:02:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22039003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ambivalentangst/pseuds/ambivalentangst
Summary: Carol gets a call from Talos just as she's kicking back with Maria and Goose, and while she's less than pleased to be cutting her time off short, he mentions Peter Parker, and, well—The kid she met on the battlefield eight months ago is apparently having a rough time stomaching his grief and a trip he took to Europe, and his aunt wants to provide him a change of scenery.Carol calls it road trip therapy, but she doesn't anticipate the kid moving into her heart along the way.
Relationships: Carol Danvers & Peter Parker, Peter Parker & Tony Stark
Comments: 43
Kudos: 463
Collections: Our Spider, SpidermanFanfiction - AlreadyRead, fluffy marvel fics (primarily irondad), my favorite marvel angst





	Just You, Me, and the Cat

**Author's Note:**

> tw: multiple descriptions of panic attacks

Carol visits Earth! As much as Maria teases about her being a distant mother—Monica works in the city and likes hearing about Carol’s adventures kicking alien ass more than seeing her being, quote, disgustingly affectionate with Maria, mind—she makes a pit stop at least every couple of months, and they’re usually a respectable length, a few days at a minimum, which is a very long time for a woman with the powers of one of the products of the universe’s creation flowing through her veins to keep still. However, even she likes the occasional rest, and she’s excited as hell to see her significant other and kid.  


That being said, she’s going to kick Talos’s ass for calling her when she’s laying back on the couch with Maria and Goose at her sides and Monica driving home for the weekend.

“What the hell do you want?”

“I—um—might have messed up. A bit. A little.”

Maria’s eyes crack open, and Carol sighs and gives her an apologetic glance as she moves off the couch, doing her best to not disturb Maria’s nap and obviously not doing a good job of it if the grunt she makes as she tugs the blanket back over her is any indication. She walks into the next room, fighting down the irritated energy pulsing through her hand before it damages her communicator.

“What did you do?” she demands to know, easing herself back against a wall.

“Well, I’m not sure how much of this is on _me_ , really, because Earth is tragically short on easily contacted superheroes. And he was already in Europe, which was very convenient for us—”

“What did you do, Talos?”

There’s a long pause, maybe a quick breath in, and Talos sounds unusually ashamed when he speaks again.

“Do you know that spider boy?”

“Spider boy?”

If he could just cut to the _chase_ —

“Peter Parker?”

_Fuck._

“Yeah, I know Peter Parker.”

//

Carol is never going to hear the end of it from Maria, but she cuts her time off short by four and a half days, give or take a few hours. She’s not happy about it, but Talos—

The kid doesn’t know what he saw as Fury was a skrull, and she’s got enough on her plate without giving him any new weird details about what went down on his so-called summer vacation.

Screw Talos.

She takes a deep breath in the quiet of the ship, which is headed towards some planet she’s never heard of before that sent up a distress call. Peter’s sitting shotgun, but he’s been mostly quiet, though Carol didn’t miss the look on his face or the gasp he couldn’t hide as they sped out into space.

Carol, contrary to popular belief, usually travels by ship. For one, it’s kind of difficult to keep things—like food—on her person in the void of space, but she’d probably find a way around that if it weren’t for Goose, who has made herself right at home on Peter’s lap.

“So did my aunt, like, call you up, or—”

His voice sputters out, and Carol can’t say that she’s not a little startled that the statuesque kid said something. Still, she tries to act like it’s nothing out of the ordinary, flipping a switch on the front panel and undoing her seatbelt to go get snacks. That’s something normal for road trip therapy, as she’s dubbed the experience, right?

She’s swinging the door to what serves as a fridge open when she responds. “Nah. I think she got ahold of Fury though, and he called me. Said you might need a change of scenery.”

More specifically, there’d been mention of trauma, way too much responsibility, and grief, which makes sense, considering the last time Carol saw the kid was at the funeral, and before that, it was sobbing over Stark’s corpse after he watched him die.

God, their first meeting was with him covered in dirt, face marred with bruising, and wrapped around the infinity gauntlet.

Carol’s not sure she’s the ideal person for it, but she gets that some extra measures need to be taken to unpack that clusterfuck. 

“Why? You been wondering?” she asks, tossing him a juice pack. Space food is weird—as much as Maria makes fun of her for it, Carol loves nothing more than a good tater tot casserole—but there are some perks to it.

His hand goes up and catches it despite that he’s still facing forward, and he mutters something Carol doesn’t catch to Goose as he opens it before continuing the conversation.

“A little,” he admits. “I mean, it’s not exactly my first time going to space on short notice, but hey.” He takes a sip, and Carol follows suit, the slurping loud in the quiet. “Is there any way to put music on?” he asks next, holding up his phone.

Figures.

“Too quiet for you?” she asks, and he shrugs.

“Kind of?” She hears the click of him undoing his seatbelt. “I can hear the ship working, but that’s still a lot less input than normal. Mostly, I’m just not sure how much talking I’m supposed to be doing, and I shut up easier when there’s something else loud going on, you know?”

Carol thinks that might be concerning, but considering she has her own problems with PTSD, she can’t quite tell. She motions to a plugin she’s gotten modified to work with Earth tech after Monica’s insistence forever ago that whatever music space has can’t be better than Taylor Swift. “You can talk however much you want, but fair enough. Here’s where you plug in.”

Another sip from her.

Another from him.

Something with guitar filters through the cockpit, and Peter keeps petting Goose.

//

She loaded him onto the ship with a suitcase, which he carried with shaking hands. His sendoff came in several forms: the tightest hug she’s ever seen coming from his aunt, a pat on the shoulder from a big man who mostly just looked tired, another hug from a boy his age, and a kiss on the cheek from a girl.

Carol really isn’t one to talk, considering her Earthen support system involves Maria, Monica, and Fury, on the assumption that Fury’s even planet-side, but she’s a special case. Peter, spider powers aside, is _normal_ , jarringly so when Carol’s memories of him before he signed on as the third passenger to her ship mainly involve a battlefield.

It seems like someone so ordinary should have more, but there’s no mother, no father, not even an uncle to go with the aunt. Just the five of them—then the four when Carol takes him out of the atmosphere.

She doesn’t ask.

Peter’s perked up a little in the few days he’s been onboard, though he asked to stay on the ship when Carol got to answering the distress call. Carol thought about making him come along and only didn’t because she wasn’t sure exactly what was waiting below. She’s grateful for having done so when things come to a shootout.

On the list of things Talos had mentioned being problems, guns had come up as a potential no-go. To that, Carol wondered why the hell everyone around Peter had decided sending him to space to help on a never-ending series of rescue missions was going to help, but what the hell did she know about childcare—teenagercare?

Whatever.

The point is, the kid stays—along with Goose, who Carol knows normally enjoys participating in the action—but that’s not the point of roadtrip therapy; she needs to get him up and moving, distracted from everything he’s got going on in his head. She returns from the call with some soot on her brow to find Peter in his bunk and promptly informs him that they’ll be going to Xandar in the next few days.

“Xandar?”

“You’ll love it. Big city, lots of sightseeing, shopping, the occasional bounty hunter. Lots of fun. We’re running low on food anyway, and hey, what kind of chaperone would I be if I didn’t make you go grocery shopping?”

Peter doesn’t argue, but shortly after she leaves him, his music—which he’s figured out how to make wireless while she was off encouraging a rebellion and is always playing now—changes from the guitar stuff to something pop. 

Carol doesn’t know near enough about what she’s gotten herself into to figure out what it means.

//

Xandar is going okay.

Okay isn’t bad, but okay isn’t good either, as is the definition of the word. Carol is not okay with things just being okay. She wants Peter to have fun because the kid’s always respectful, funny when he talks—but he doesn’t talk without prompting, which she is becoming more and more sure is, in fact, a problem—but he’s fucking _sad_ all the time.

As someone with experience feeling if not lost then at minimum like they’re in the wrong place, Carol hates it.

She hates the constant jumping even more.

The aunt had pulled her to the side while Peter and his friends had gone up to explore the ship before takeoff, mentioned that the kid hadn’t been quite right since coming back from Europe, trying too hard to seem put together for her and his friends but not leaving his bed without prompting, not even being as active as Spider-Man.

_“It was like this after Tony—um—you know—but I thought he was doing okay.”_

Another reason Carol wants to kick Talos’s teeth in at the moment.

She puts a hand on his shoulder to show him a monument— _flinch._

Someone brushes past them in the walkway— _flinch._

He nearly stumbles over a rock he didn’t see in his path— _flinch._

Goose is illegal to have in civilian spaces on Xandar, but Carol almost wishes she smuggled her in to make Peter feel better because the kid’s a wreck. He eventually finds a space off to the side to shake in when she points out the city’s public transportation system, and Carol feels like shit.

Scratch okay, Xandar has taken a nosedive from okay to bad— _ridiculously_ bad.

“Sorry—sorry,” he stutters out, hand on a wall, breaths coming out hard. “I’m just—sorry—I’m really sorry—trains are—ugh—fuck—I’m so sorry—”

It’s the most he’s said in a solid few days.

“Kid, say another sorry, and I’ll kick Goose out of your bunk for a week. It’s okay.”

How does she deal with this? He’s crying now—shit, he’s _crying_ —and people are walking past and staring, and Carol wants to scream at them.

Can’t they see he’s freaking out? Can’t they see the train—of all things, a _train_ , what the hell—unraveling him bit by bit? Why do they have to make it a big deal?

The shaking’s getting more intense, and Carol doesn’t know what to do except tug him close and try to move as much out of the way as they can get. She wasn’t sure he’d accept the touch, but more than accept it, he melts into it, sniffing, breaths coming hot against her shoulder.

“I’ve got you,” she whispers. “I’ve got your back, kid.”

She holds him until the tears and trembling stops, but when she asks if he wants to forget it and head back to the ship, he says no.

“All of this is, like, super cool,” he insists, voice still a little choked up as he scrubs a hand down his cheek. “I’m just—weird right now. I want to see it, I swear.”

Carol’s hesitant, but they keep going, looking at anything that catches either of their eyes. That’s everything for Peter, but Carol doesn’t mind. With the panic attack past them, he’s jumping less and actually seems excited, and when they find a novelty shop?

Carol barely recognizes the figurines he pounces on— _“Oh my god, Han and Leia!”_ —but she pays way too much for them anyway because it’s the first time she’s seen the kid genuinely smile.

When they get back to the ship and unload the groceries they eventually got, Carol decides Xandar going okay is just fine.

//

Peter says he wants to go with her for the next distress call. That’s surprising for a number of reasons, the least of which is that despite starting to come out of his shell since Xandar, there’s still a tired sadness in the brown of his eyes and a jumpiness in his limbs Carol’s newly hyperaware of every time the ship gives a particularly intense shudder.

“I brought my suit!” he insists, and it’s true. With a thought, shiny red, gold, and blue covers his body, and his big, white eyes blink up at her pleadingly.

Despite planning on bringing him along the first time, Carol’s not sure fighting is helpful for roadtrip therapy after all. If she never saw the train thing coming, how is she supposed to know what’s safe for him to be around in a situation where he could die if he makes the wrong move? Peter’s under her care, after all, and though he’s trying, he’s still a pint-sized mess.

Carol, to some extent, is self-aware of her own problems and has read a fair amount about mental illness. All that she’s taken from that research is debatable, but one book that struck a nerve had a phrase she’s yet to forget: _progress isn’t linear._

(What if she sends him into relapse? What if he has another panic attack mid-fight and gets hurt? What if?)

She can’t risk it— _him._

“Not this one,” she says as gently as possible while also remaining firm and is proud of herself for being responsible even though she desperately wants to see him in action.

Peter sighs and tries to argue, but Carol doesn’t budge, another part of the chaperoning deal she’s proud of.

She heads out, content with Peter in sweats and watching what he calls “space movies” on the tablet she gave him a while back, which is his very general term for movies not made on Earth.

He drops in and throws her to the ground approximately a second and a half before someone tries to shoot her in the face and, as Monica would say, kicks alien _ass._

Carol assumed he was capable. After all, he fought in the final battle, fought whatever he went up against in Europe, and came out the other side. However, no one bothered to tell her how fast the little shit is, darting around a fight with little regard for the laws of physics or anyone’s idea of what weapons should look like.

She can’t even deny the laugh that slips past her lips when, as they begin to retreat, the complaining starts about the webs he’s left a good dozen government officials in.

She still has a bone to pick with Talos, but she can’t deny that if she was in a tight situation, she wouldn’t hesitate to call Peter to back her up.

Back on the ship, Carol tries to be angry.

“I told you to stay on the ship.”

“You were trying to baby me.”

“You could’ve been hurt!”

“I’ve had worse than a few cuts and bruises.”

He actually rolls his eyes at her, and Carol wishes she could say she isn’t proud to see some spark come back into his eyes that have been some level of heartbroken, listless, or panicked for almost all the time she’s known him. She manages a few seconds longer of looking pissed, and then she deflates, shaking her head in a kind of exasperated pride.

“You’re a punk, you know that, Parker?”

He has the audacity to grin, and Carol pulls him close to mess up the hair he’s attempted to gel back as he shouts in protest.

Maybe she’s not so bad at this after all.

//

Carol relents and lets Peter join her when things come to blows, and she can’t deny how much she loves to hear his whoops of exhilaration when he gets a good lick in or the soft _wow_ s he lets slip through their comms when she does something he thinks is especially cool.

She ribs him when they train, but he really is an amazing fighter. His reflexes are insane, he’s strong as hell, and while she figured he had an impressive brain in that head of his when he successfully modified the ship for his music with no training or prior knowledge of the model, not to mention found a way to charge his phone in space, she knows it when he makes her go shopping for ingredients for his web fluid, the process of making which goes hopelessly over her head.

In one of her increasingly common exasperated-pride episodes, she merely shakes her head and tells him not to blow up the ship.

Aside from the web fluid, he likes tinkering with spare parts—“ _They’re from_ space _, okay, let me have this._ ”—and while Carol is glad he has a good time with that, she usually leaves him to it. When she comes to the back of the ship where he’s set up his work station, she’s prompted by the unusual song that’s popped up in his playlist. It has guitar, but it’s more intense than usual, and the lead singer absolutely howls the lyrics. It concerns her a little bit, honestly, what with Peter’s normal rotation of what he’s explained is pop, pop-punk, alternative, and the occasional bout of showtunes.

“Everything cool back here?” she asks, just for good measure, though Peter’s been having a good day.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah—why?” He peeks his head up from its spot examining a robot he’s been making, and Carol shrugs, leaning back against a wall to take a look at his work.

“Different music choice—wanted to be sure nothing was up.”

Peter blinks, and though he smiles, it’s sad.

_Shit, shit, shit—_

“It was Tony’s favorite,” he admits.

_Oh._

Carol isn’t sure how to respond at first, but she ends up smiling back, also softer than normal. “Thanks for sharing,” she says simply, and after a glance at his phone, takes the time to commit the title Back In Black to memory.

The song’s one way she knows he’s getting better, but he’s also smiling more, laughs, even, and Carol increasingly dreads the day she’ll have to tote him back to Earth. The most she’s ever had for a copilot is Goose, and while she loves her, it’s not the same as Peter bounding into the cockpit in pink pajama bottoms because he found a space movie about flerkens— _“Goose needs to see her people, Carol!”_

It’s a shitty horror movie that sends them into stitches, and Goose purrs from Peter’s lap every second of it.

It’s that night, having started another movie despite Peter’s fluttering eyelids, that Carol ends up with a teenager sleeping on her shoulder.

Yeah, she’s really going to miss him.

//

They’ve settled into a rhythm—one where Peter doesn’t flinch nearly as much, for the record—and Carol forgets her initial worry about letting Peter on missions: triggers she’ll never be able to see coming.

It’s in a city, Peter swinging from building to building in delight as they gear up to fight a persistent band of eco-terrorists, that a green fog fills the streets Peter’s surveying. It doesn’t even _do_ anything except make it hard to see and match the group’s logo, which pisses Carol off beyond belief because she spends the entire fight worried out of her mind for her kid who’s MIA because of it.

Peter _always_ has her back, even when she doesn’t need it, so what the fuck is holding him up?

Nothing in the comms, not even a written message on her communicator—it drives Carol insane, and she hunts him down as soon as she’s able, civilian cries of thanks falling on deaf ears.

She finds him in a metallic ball of limbs on a random roof.

“Peter?”

Nothing—he won’t even glance up.

“Peter?”

Still nothing.

“Come on, kid. You freaked me out back there. Where was my partner in crime?”

If anything, he tries to ball himself up tighter.

“Alright, alright.” She sighs, trying to steady herself. “It’s okay, kid, it’s just me,” she murmurs, reaching out to hold him like she did that day on Xandar.

“Don’t touch me!” he screams, shoving her back, and Carol has never heard that note of pure _terror_ in his voice before. It sends shivers down her spine, and the force the kid is using—

Carol is rarely in pain, but the blow leaves an ache she can’t deny.

(How scared is he?)

Carol has no idea what to do, not even a clue as to where to begin. She’s never been so lost in the entire time he’s been with her, but she knows Peter isn’t scared of her, only what he must think she is.

She crouches down, attempts to make herself as non-threatening as possible, and tries again because there’s nothing else to do. “Peter, it’s me, Carol. You’re on—” She actually has to check that. “—Vanplaxis with me on a mission.”

“ _Tellmesomethingonlyyouknow.”_

“What?”

“Tell me something only you know,” he pants, and despite not unfurling himself, refusing to look at her, he’s managing to inch away.

It breaks Carol’s heart, but she does as he asks.

(How did it get to be that she’d do anything for him?)

“Alright, I can do that. Uh—your aunt, your two friends, and that big dude saw you off when you left with me.”

“Someone could’ve seen with satellites,” he mutters, almost too low for her to catch. “Something else.”

Carol tries again.

“Last week, we watched a space movie about flerkens. It was terrible, and you compared it to Sharknado. Goose hung out with us the whole time, and—”

Before she can get another word out, he’s in her arms, holding her tight enough to bruise a lesser person.

“It’s really you,” he whispers, though he still won’t look up.

“It’s really me,” she promises and says nothing about Peter’s sobs as she totes him back to the ship.

//

He’s better with a mug of hot cocoa in hand. Carol keeps a stockpile, supplied by what she can swipe from Maria’s, and she’s never been more grateful. They’re in the seats in the cockpit, facing each other, and Carol’s taken the liberty of wrapping a few blankets around his shoulders.

He’s still shaking, and she purposely poured a little less hot cocoa than she technically could’ve so it didn’t slosh over the sides.

“You wanna’ talk about it?” she asks carefully.

He shrugs, taking a sip of his cocoa.

“What’s there to talk about?” he murmurs, and the words are bitter. They sound wrong, coming from Peter’s mouth. She tries to speak, but he’s still going. “That I saw the fog and thought everything around me was fake? That I was going to see Tony’s corpse again? That I thought he was going to hit me with another train, try to fucking _kill me_ again?”

His tears, previously dried up, are coming steadily again, and his mouth is contorted in a strange combination of a snarl and a wail, unstoppable as it spews more godawful things Carol selfishly wishes she didn’t have to know about.

“That I almost got my friends killed too because I couldn’t shut up? That I—that everything was _my_ fault, and Tony wanted me to be better, and I—I almost died still at the end because he tried to shoot me in the fucking head, and—and—”

And Peter stops being able to talk.

Carol hates that she understands the train meltdown now, however vaguely, and she hates whoever _he_ is. For that matter, she wants to strangle Talos with renewed vigor, but Talos is across the galaxy if he knows what’s good for him whereas Peter is breaking apart in front of her.

Carol takes his mug before he spills on himself, setting it aside so that she can move them to the floor to hug him again.

It takes a long time and a lot of tears, but she gets the full story of everything, of his uncle and homecoming, Thanos and Beck.

(Carol wants to wrap Peter up and never let him go.)

“And Beck is dead?” she asks near the end.

Peter’s nod does nothing to stop the scorch marks her hands leave from their place set on the blankets.

(She hopes Beck, from where he’s rotting, knows how lucky he is that he kicked the bucket before she got her hands on him.)

The second time Peter falls asleep on her isn’t nearly as happy as the first, but Carol carries him to bed regardless because that’s her kid, rain or shine.

(She hopes everyone back on Earth knows how lucky they are to have him.)

//

With everything laid out, it’s easier for them to avoid unpleasant surprises in the weeks they have left together. In that time, Carol spends every second she can grateful that Talos decided road trip therapy was the way to go because she’s not sure how she ever went through her life without Peter Parker there with some 2000s hit she’s never heard before or a pun that’s not funny but makes her snort nonetheless.

When she sits nearby and does a word search as Peter tinkers and especially when his song plays, Carol thinks of Tony Stark.

Despite being the one to rescue him, she can’t say she knew him well. She admires his sacrifice, naturally, but she didn’t shape it.

Carol tries not to think of it often, but it’s crossed her mind before: _what might’ve happened if she managed to snap instead?_

It’s a terrible thought, especially now that she’s seen Peter on a bad day, when he lets Back in Black play on loop as he shuts himself in his room and Carol pretends not to hear his sniffles.

Would he have been there to stop Beck? Would she have gotten her chance with Peter?

There are a thousand possibilities all centered around what could’ve happened if Tony had lived, but Carol’s always been practical, and that’s not really what she focuses on as much as how much it had to hurt for him to lose Peter.

She lived through the five years, as did Maria and Monica. Fury was the biggest hole in her heart, and the loss of him crippled her when she let herself grieve, make no mistake. She went to Maria and cried for days, for him, for her failure, but she remembers hearing Stark’s whisper as he stepped off the ship.

_“I lost the kid.”_

Peter has stories about him that he tells her with that same sad smile, and she knows he loved him.

Tony had years with him and even longer without him. Carol has had around a month and a half and will have to take him home soon, and she would kill and die for him.

(Carol knows Tony had to love him back because if he had all that extra time, there’s no way Peter didn’t manage to wrap his heart up even tighter than he has Carol’s now.)

She aches with sympathy for a dead man and thanks him all the same for bringing the kid in question to her.

One of Carol’s favorite things to bring up, actually, is the suit Stark made him.

“So nice to see you in my colors,” she tells him one day before they head out for a mission.

He practically squawks, bounding after her. “They’re not yours!” he protests.

“How long have you been wearing them?”

“Uh—nothing much, just _my whole time as an Avenger_.”

“Funny, ‘cause I’ve been wearing them since before you were born. Checkmate,” she teases, flying away before he can get another word in.

Peter can’t _stand_ it being brought up, and it’s hilarious up until Peter embraces it and starts calling himself Captain Marvel’s sidekick, to which she grins and—believe it or not—shakes her head.

“Spider-Man’s nobody’s sidekick,” she tells him later over juice packs and says nothing about the smile that spreads across his face because he thinks she’s not looking.

The day does come though when he has to go home, and Carol’s surprisingly teary as they come into the solar system.

“What am I going to do without a bug in my ship?” she muses, and Peter sticks his tongue out at her, playing with Goose from where he’s seated with his legs crossed on the ceiling.

“What am I going to do without someone complaining about my playlists?” he fires back, swinging the toy he’s using just out of Goose’s reach as she meows in frustration.

Carol can’t find it in herself to care, though she does use the comment as an excuse to chase him down and make him go get his things packed.

He complains the whole way there, but the music changes from alternative to pop.

(Carol knows by now that means he’s happy.)

//

They’re waiting in a field for everyone to show up. They got in early, and though Carol won’t say anything to Peter, she’s glad they have a little longer together. He’s in his seat in the cockpit, kicking his legs when he speaks.

“I think you can tell because I’m not—you know—as much of a mess anymore, but this helped. A lot.”

Carol knows, but it makes her unreasonably happy to hear him acknowledge it for himself.

“Happy to be of service,” she replies, watching Goose headbutt Peter’s hand. She’s trying not to talk too much, honestly, because then she’s going to start crying, and she doesn’t want Peter feeling bad about anything.

Lucky for her, he’s staring out the window, watching the wind blow through the grass, and has more to say. 

(She’s so happy she found out he likes to talk.)

“I’m—a little scared? Because I think part of the reason this worked so well is because everything was so different, it was hard to be reminded of anything. And now that I’m here—”

“You’re scared to remember.”

Peter nods.

Carol gets it.

“Kid, you’re incredible. If anyone can do this, it’s you. Beck’s gone, Thanos is gone, and—”

She _really_ hopes she’s not overstepping.

“Tony loved you—a lot.”

“How do you know?” he asks, barely a whisper.

“Because it’s impossible not to,” she replies, flashing a smile, _shit, shit, don’t cry—_

She’s crying, and Peter’s crying, and they’re hugging, and Carol could keep this new part of her heart tucked close to her pretty much forever and be okay with it.

They stay like that, Goose curled around Peter’s ankles, until Peter sees a car on the horizon and they head out to meet them.

Carol ends road trip therapy with even more reason to be visiting Earth, and she can only imagine what Maria will say about it.

**Author's Note:**

> Aah!! I had this idea a few weeks ago and decided I wanted to actually publish something before my winter break ended, so I wrote this between. like. 11 pm to 4 am last night. I couldn't get the idea of Carol taking Peter on a trip post-ffh to clear his head out of my mind, and here we are. If you didn't see in the notes, this fic ignores the mid-credit scene in favor of Bonding, so there's that.
> 
> Thank you so much for reading, and if you liked it, feel free to drop a kudos and/or a comment—they make my day!! If you want to come yell at me about this fic or anything else, I have a Marvel-only blog that can be found [here!](https://ambivalentmarvel.tumblr.com)


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